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Looking to Scale Your Business? 4 Things to Focus On

Growing a successful business takes a lot of resources and hard work. That’s probably why roughly 96 percent fail before they reach ten years. One of the most difficult parts of running a company is scaling the business. This can be particularly difficult if you experience early success.

To keep your business on the right track as you look to scale, here are some areas that you should focus on.

Practice Due Diligence with New Hires

If you talk to many successful entrepreneurs, they’ll tell you that hiring the right people is one of the most important things you can do. The importance of hiring smartly is amplified during the scaling process. When businesses are forced to hire employees to meet production demands, there is a tendency to be more lax with vetting the hires.

However, the businesses that scale successfully do it by practicing due diligence with their hiring process and focusing on finding employees who are a culture fit and qualified. Hiring the wrong person doesn’t just costs thousands of dollars, it can cause production inefficiencies and hurt your employee ecosystem. Tools like Proven atomically submit your job posting to more than 100 job boards, which can increase your total applicants and the likelihood of finding the right employees.

Put the Right People in the Right Roles

A successful company is greater than the sum of its parts. This concept means that individually, an employee’s contribution may seem miniscule, but within the machine that is the company, when all the employees work cohesively, they can create immeasurable value.

To make your company as efficient as possible, it’s critical to have the right people in the right positions. One way to do that is to focus on your employees’ individual strengths and weaknesses so that you can put them in roles that maximize their strengths. The MBTI is a personality tool that can be used to assess your employee’s individual traits. By understanding how your employees think and what environments they thrive in, you can set them up to succeed and increase the productivity of your company. Knowing your employees and understanding what drives them on an individual level can help you scale your business with ease.

Focus on Control and Processes

Diseconomies of scale is one of the biggest issues that face companies as they look to grow. Essentially, this term means that as you increase production you also increase the likelihood that errors will arise in production.

Think of a small burger restaurant that has one location and one cook. The quality is consistent because there is one location and one person handling production. However, if the restaurant decides to open three more locations, the cook must now train other cooks and practice quality assurance to make sure the consistency from the original location is replicated across all locations. This control is extremely difficult, especially as production demands increase.

If your company wants to scale successfully, you need to emphasize control through documented processes and procedures. Understand how production within your company works and collaborate with your employees to improve efficiencies and create procedures that have built-in checkpoints for quality assurance.

Cohesive Marketing is Critical

In order to scale a young company, you must generate sales. This hinges on creative and cohesive marketing communication. It starts with your brand’s logo and tagline. Pick a logo, color scheme, and message that reflects your company’s mission and is also memorable.

As you expand your marketing to social media, email, direct mail, and other channels, make sure you have a cohesive message that is uniform across all mediums and formats. Many young brands create silos for each of their marketing channels. These silos focus on their individual campaigns and initiatives without a holistic understanding of how it integrates with other departments.

Never Stop Growing

Keep in mind, while the above can help you scale your young business, there are still no sweeping generalizations. The important takeaway is to continue to focus on business peripherals. Your product or service can be the best in your industry, but if you don’t focus on your personnel, your process, and your marketing, you’ll struggle to scale successfully.